Category: Genre-Bender

by a contributor

Isabelle Davis

(we create metaphors of death and dying to symbolize love as if
people cannot survive on their own. we are self indulgent and dramatic
and over the top. we are telling the truth the only way we know how.)

when I’m with her I line up our inhales and exhales perfectly. she
knows I do this but not how much it matters. breathing becomes simple
again. I feel alive again. she keeps me far away from metaphorical death
and dying. it’s when I’m far away from her that I start to believe. I’m
no longer convinced that little men aren’t carefully stacking bricks on
my chest. I squeeze my eyes shut as tight as possible and I can almost
imagine her hand wrapped around my waist but not quite. someone tells a
funny joke I try to relay to her but doesn’t quite translate over text
and so then we both feel stupid. we sit in silence on the phone and I
struggle to hear what I can’t feel—but the line doesn’t pick up the
delicate in/out of her lungs. the construction workers pick up their
pace.

the foundation has always been set in me. good and bad have never
been simple. I am not the only one who notices this but sometimes I feel
like it. some things that make people cry make different people laugh
and some things make people both laugh and cry. I guess I could have
seen this as beautiful but it mostly just made me see most things as
uncertain. that’s the foundation I built my life around—my soul around.
it started in my chest so that’s where they lay the bricks. every day
every hour every minute every second away from her means that more
bricks collect on top of my lungs. they press down. hard.

it symbolizes suffocation. I know because it’s my metaphor. breathing
becomes the hardest thing in the world without her. but then she
touches my face or moves a piece of my hair back or hugs me and the
house blows away. she barely blinks on it and that force disintegrates
the bricks into nothingness because she is everything.

tom hanks forgot how to breathe when his wife died in sleepless in seattle.
on my tenth birthday I watched that movie and cried the whole way
through because god, did those people know how to love. getting oxygen
to the brain is one of the most basic functions. synchronizing intrinsic
actions becomes the most important thing to me. it breaks the
foundation of uncertainty I’ve spent so long harboring in me. when she
falls asleep the pattern changes and I have to adjust but that’s okay.

Isabelle Davis still has plastic
glow-in-the-dark stars hanging on her ceiling. She worked as a writer
and Columns Editor for Pacemaker winner Niles West News and currently edits for The Lawrentian. Her work has appeared in Dirty Chai and Wes Anderzine. She is currently pursuing a Creative Writing degree. You can find her on twitter @isa13itch.

♦

by a contributor

Kathleen Brewin Lewis

Because you think your poetry has become too full of clear skies and
morning birdsong, you begin breaking your pills in half. There’s a
little line in the middle of the peachy, oval medication you take each
day indicating it is designed to be divided. The act makes a small but
satisfying popping sound. Now you take only half of a pill per diem.

After a couple of days, a little fog rolls in, but just around the
periphery. You can feel your bruises again, can finger the bumpy ridges
on your scars—old friends. You’re back to arranging your words in a
beat-up notebook in random coffee shops, and what you write about has an
edge. Not a black hole, just an edge. You can still be chirpy with your
friends and family, like they like you to be, which is why you keep
taking half a pill.

You realize you had actually missed crying, like you’d miss the rain
if it never fell anymore. Similarly there are days you think you just
might jiggle for joy. And there are other benefits to cutting your dose
in half: You can have two glasses of wine without feeling like your
tongue is malfunctioning. You don’t fall asleep with your mouth hanging
open in the movies. You write better poetry when you are pissed at your
boyfriend. Or at least you write faster, pounding away on the keyboard
or bearing down hard with that pencil, putting urgency–and a kind of
insurgency–into your work.

Here’s the thing: it’s supposed to hurt when the hardwoods start to
drop their leaves; it’s appropriate to be filled with feeling when the
sun lowers itself into the sea. Hunky-dory turns out to be
half-hearted. There’s no more riveting place from which to write than
what feels like the beginning of the end.

Kathleen Brewin Lewis is an Atlanta writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Yemassee, Southern Humanities Review, Foundling Review, Heron Tree, Weave Magazine, and The Southern Poetry Anthology Vol. V: Georgia. She’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is senior editor of Flycatcher journal. She has an MA in Professional Writing from Kennesaw State University.

by a contributor

Richard Baldasty

Springtime, we clamored, and there it rose like enchantment summoned:
birds giddy on last year’s berries, ants out from hiding, little plants
with little bells dancing mazurkas whether it rained or hailed or sun
barged through. We felt it in our bones, bones getting frisky, bones
feeling stretchy, vertebrae eager for some primo vernal whoop-de-do.
Which may, or may not, have connected with the start of the uprising. In
any case, revolution did begin almost the very next thing. Nothing
violent yet still decisive: our wintry old rulers fled within a
fortnight. What then could we do? Potatoes had already been planted,
also early bitter greens. But it was yet much too soon for even thinking
about tomatoes or a heat-lover like purple Thai basil. So we fell back
upon the usual, embarrassingly inept erotic home videos, an
ill-conceived do-it-yourself basement remodel, adopting a shelter dog no
one could love, joining another book-and-brew club. We read Kafka,
drank pilsner. We reread Tess of the d’Urbervilles and got drunk
butt-ugly on room-temp brown ale. It was so sad, all of it, page upon
page, but we stayed with her, hoping against hope it might end better
this time. Of course, it didn’t, Tess taken away again for hanging, for
certain things remain too sorely engraved ever to change.

Richard Baldasty’s poetry and short prose have appeared in Pinyon, Epoch, and New Delta Review among other literary magazines. Work archived online includes publication in AntipodeanSF, Dark Fire, Café Irreal, and Marco Polo Literary Arts; Twitter verse at escarp and Twitter fiction at Seven by Twenty; literary collage in Fickle Muses, Ray’s Road Review, and forthcoming (May) with Big Bridge; and text/image at Shuf Poetry and (mid-April) Burrow Press Review.

See Richard’s list of 5 Things You Should Read tomorrow in our ongoing contributors’ series.

1. Preheat oven to 385 degrees. I know. You think I made a typo.
You’re saying to yourself, Helena doesn’t know a teaspoon from a
teakettle. You’re smirking that you’ve baked cookies for years and your
idiot sister probably meant 375. I don’t care if you use your
fancy-assed convection oven or your hundred dollar Williams-Sonoma
baking mats. It just matters that the temperature is 385. Apparently it
isn’t acceptable that I do even one thing better than you, so you
publicly insist (at our father’s goddamned wake, for Christ’s sake) that
I give you the recipe because Michael liked them so much. So don’t fuck
with me.

2. Put the shortening into the bowl of your custom painted Kitchen
Aid. No, you can’t use butter. Yes, you constantly assert that you’d
never feed Michael chemicals, lest the two of you damage your organic
reputations, but what you don’t tell your foodie group won’t hurt them.
You can’t discard things just because they aren’t made exactly how you
wish they were. You’d waste everything in your fridge that way and
Michael hates waste even more than you hate chemicals and you should
know this by now.

5. Add the vanilla. You can take this opportunity to use that really
expensive shit you bought in Madagascar. It’s better than letting it
evaporate. Like Dad used to say, you can’t take it with you. He sure
didn’t. I’m really enjoying his coffee maker, though. That was very
generous of you to think of me.

6. Now mix everything up until it’s fluffy and then stop. This takes
about thirty seconds. That’s just a little bit longer than it took you
to learn to roller skate, to decide to take Dad off life support, to
reel in the man I’d always loved.

7. Crack the eggs into a small bowl to — you’ll love this part
— ensure there are no imperfections. No shells, no blood, no
half-formed chickens. Add them into the bowl and mix another thirty
seconds, until just incorporated. That’s just a little bit shorter than
it took for me to string a sentence together after you called to
announce your engagement.

8. In a medium-sized bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, and salt
with a whisk. Together, these things are as white and fluffy as your
wedding dress.

9. Turn the mixer on low. Gradually add the flour into the mixture
until it becomes the consistency of play-doh. If it isn’t that
consistency, add flour by the 1/2 cupfuls to get it that way. Careful,
the flour does tend to poof its way out of the mixer at this point, and I
know how much you hate messes.

10. Take the bowl off the mixer and stir in the chocolate chips with a
wooden spoon. You can do this with the mixer, but the chocolate chips
will break. You’ve never had a problem breaking things (elbows, hearts,
etc.) but it will make the cookies unsightly and nobody would want that.

11. Spoon large scoops of dough onto a cookie sheet, leaving them in a
rough ball about 2-3 inches apart. I can get 16 on a normal sheet.
Don’t crowd them. Don’t smash them. Yes, you could make them smaller,
but that isn’t the point of a cookie. A cookie is special. You don’t eat
a cookie every day. When you decide to eat one, do it with abandon. Eat
a big fat cookie and revel in it instead of picking your way through
the small, cold, detritus of your kitchen. If you want to make these for
Michael, the least you can do is to make them fucking correctly. With
soul (if you still have one).

12. Bake one sheet at a time for exactly 12 minutes. Let the cookies
sit on the sheet for another two minutes and then put them on a cooling
rack. This will allow them to stay chewy in the middle without allowing
them to seep through the slats of the rack like a science project. Like
me after your reception when I had to be rescued from that strappy deck
chair, trapped by bourbon and purple bridesmaid’s bows. Like Dad’s skin
in the casket, forty pounds lost in as many days.

13. Eat cookies immediately with milk. Laugh about how you’ll make them for the children you secretly don’t want.

14. Claim it’s your recipe.

15. Please, don’t ever do this to me again.

Camille Griep lives and writes in Seattle, Washington. Her work has been featured in Every Day Fiction, The First Line, Bound Off, Short, Fast & Deadly, and Punchnel’s.

♦

by a contributor

The Storm came for Jimmy last Tuesday. Me, Cal and Ralston were
sitting on the porch, drinking beer, watching the street like usual,
when it appeared ’cross the way in front of Jimmy’s house.

It was just like we’d seen on the news. Just like all those videos on YouTube.

My favorite video is one of the first ones. You know the one that was
took in the subway in New York. Some tourist was shooting movies of his
family when the cloud appeared, that dark familiar cloud, a thunderhead
in a bottle. It just oozed out of the ceiling and hovered there for a
moment, growing larger, blocking out a couple of the fluorescent lights.
There’d been some reports by then, so folks knew what was coming and
they started screaming and running, but they’re on a subway platform, so
there’s really no place to go. This was before we all knew running
didn’t make no difference. The tourist kept rolling, though his wife
told him to get the hell out of there and his kids were crying in the
background. He just keeps shooting, steady as a government job, keeping
the Storm in his sights, even as it moves toward him, then over him,
then past him. It stops over this young guy with scraggly hair on his
face and none on the top of his head. Now we all know what’s coming, but
he didn’t really, not then. So, he moves left and the cloud stays over
him and then he moves right and it follows. The rain starts down on him.
Everyone else has scattered away, so he’s the only one getting wet. And
he stops fighting it, just stands there, soaking in it, as the tornado
drops down around him and the lightning starts crackling inside it.
After a minute, it all just disappears, the tornado, the lightning, the
cloud, the guy, gone.

Turns out the cloud is really small. No bigger than a Buick. And in
person, it ain’t that big a deal, just hanging there, threatening to
rain on someone. For a moment, before it headed toward Jimmy’s front
door, I wondered if it was gonna come get one of us instead. You do feel
that in your throat, I have to admit, the possibility of it.

He was right about that, of course. When the Storm comes for you,
there ain’t nothing you can do about it. Just let it take you. That’s
why me and Cal and Ralston sat on the porch and drank a bit in our spare
time, rather than hiding like some folks. Folks like Jimmy who didn’t
go to work no more and stayed in their basements all day and read the
websites trying to figure out how to outsmart the Storm. I like some of
the websites, the one with the ticker in particular, that one that tells
you how many people the Storm’s gotten so far. Don’t know how the guy
knows how many have disappeared – the Storm’s popping up in more and
more places these days – but he claims to know and it’s more interesting
than the sites that want $19.95 to tell you how to survive, more honest
I think. Last I checked, the Storm had taken nearly ten thousand, but
that was a couple of days ago, before Jimmy.

People been praying a lot, saying this is the apocalypse. The End
Days, one person at a time. Others think it is aliens or maybe the
government or maybe someone else’s government. No one really knows.

The lights went out in Jimmy’s house, all of them. That’s one of the
first things the websites say to do, like the Storm has eyes or
something, like it can’t see in the dark. Those sites are full of it –
no one knows what the Storm is. No one knows why it comes for some or
who’s gonna be next. No one knows. Jimmy must’ve figured out it had come
for him – maybe he heard the rustling of the wind or felt the change in
air pressure. So what’d he do? Turned out his goddamned lights.

The Storm disappeared through Jimmy’s front door. So much for all
that security we saw him installing a couple weeks ago. For a few
minutes, nothing happened and we thought maybe Jimmy got this one
covered, maybe he’s got this rap beat, maybe he’d be a celebrity living
through the Storm and all, and folks would want to talk to us and put us
on the news because we were there when it happened.

No such luck. We saw the flashes through the basement windows. One
two three, then gone. Then, silence and darkness from Jimmy’s house. Cal
took out his cell phone to call the hotline just like they said to do
on the TV. Scientists and government folks will come out and check out
Jimmy’s house and take some samples that won’t help much. No one needs
to get the body – there ain’t none to be got.

I reached into the cooler for another beer and listened to Cal call in the sighting.

I cracked the cap right off and took a long, deep swig, knowing without a doubt that that was the damn whole truth.

Michael Landweber’s stories have appeared in Fugue, Fourteen Hills, Gargoyle, Barrelhouse and a bunch of other places. His first novel, We, will be published by Coffeetown Press in September 2013. He is an Associate Editor at Potomac Review and a contributor at Pop Matters. He won’t find it at all creepy if you follow him @mlandweber.

♦

by a contributor

Marci Vogel

Occasionally it rings, and so we answer without identifying the
caller because we are of the few remaining who don’t have caller ID, and
anyway it’s probably either my dear one’s mother or mine, or maybe the
lady from Helping Hands for the Blind. She never says what she wants
exactly, just announces: Helping Hands forthe Blind, voice trailing off in expectation.

Lately it’s just as likely to be Alan from the Census Bureau. We’re
on a first-name basis–mine’s Jane, as in Doe. My dear one accepted a
$25.00 gift card in exchange for participating in a special survey, and
now Alan calls monthly to find out what happened to money we no longer
have.

We once spoke for an hour, and I told Alan how I spent the former president’s tax-rebate on artwork, a painting called Little Deaths
which remains unhung on our wall, and how I spent my dear one’s, too,
on a Japanese maple he planted over the loyal body of our red chow, who
died in the spring. “Alan,” I asked, “how exactly do you check-off this
information? Are there boxes on your spreadsheet for beauty, for
sadness?”

“Don’t you worry, Janie,” he said, “I’ve got my tricks.”

My dear one refuses to speak with Alan anymore. At least the devil waits until you’re dead before he collects,
he said after the third month. I tried in good faith to speak for all
the Does in the house, but last time Alan called, I told him I couldn’t
answer any more questions, not until summer, when the days were longer,
and it felt as if I had more time. “I’m hanging up on you, Alan,” I
said. “I’m sorry,” and I was.

The Helping Hands for the Blind lady, now that’s a different story.
We’ve never cut her off, not once. Maybe it’s because she has no tricks,
only leaves enough space between words. Helping Hands for the Blind, she says, and we respond: Nothing, sorry. But once in a while––when the leaves on the maple are scarlet, for example––we answer: Yes, we do have something to offer, and her familiar voice on the line lights up: Fine! Pickup Wednesday. I’ll call back to remind you, and she does.

Marci Vogel is a
native of Los Angeles, where she attends USC’s PhD Program in
Literature and Creative Writing as a Provost Fellow. Her poetry has been
twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the AWP Intro Journals Award.
Recent work appears or is forthcoming in FIELD, Puerto del Sol, ZYZZYVA, Anti-, and the Seneca, Colorado, and Atlas reviews. Her first chapbook, Valiant, is available from Finishing Line Press.